Buzzfeed’s report explains the ins and outs of how Facebook has let’s-say-inadvertently constructed a site that rewards sensationalized and extremist content, and company policies that tolerate anti-Muslim extremism even when discovered.
But let’s not beat around the issue here. It’s not that Facebook and other top content sites (see: YouTube) can’t take steps to limit the ability of extremist groups to spread false claims and recruit new allies: It’s that the sites themselves act as clickbait mills, preferentially elevating controversial content that drives site interactions and ad revenues. They may be outsourcing the most unseemly bits to Macedonian fake news sites and the worldwide far-right conspiracy movement, but the bottom line is that they’re raking in enormous amounts of money from those links. It’s corporate growth requirements, not algorithms, that’s keeping extremist content up and easily accessible.
The tech companies are hardly alone in this. From Fox News to Donald Trump to Rep. Steve King and his ilk, wide swaths of conservative media are equally devoted to edging as far toward actual conspiracy-mongering and violence-promotion as they can possibly get away with, all for the purpose of regularly and incessantly prodding audiences into an obsessive, extremely profitable panic.
The advertising giants were only goaded into taking begrudging action on anti-vaccination propaganda after a new series of infectious disease outbreaks began to make clear the extent to which such propaganda was taking hold and doing real-world damage. The steady drumbeat of far-right anti-Muslim violence has yet to produce the same reckoning—but it should.